Tell-Tell's 5 days to better poetry - DAY 2

Heyooo!

    We're here again! This one is going to be a little bit shorter...

DAY 1 ~~~ HOW LONG CAN YOU GO?

Playing with my poem:

    Sooo, the exercise consists on holding the urge to break the lines for as long as you can, and I should take the same poem (or stanzas, in my case) I used yesterday, so here it is in both languages.

Me seguía un fantasma, una sombra en mi caminar;
Una sombra en cadenas que dificultaba mi andar
En mis pies no pude pies de gracia y gacela hallar…
¡Sólo pasto que crece para mi avance refrenar!

I was followed by a ghost, a shadow, in my walking,
a shadow in chains that made my walking more difficult.
In my feet, I could not feet of grace and gazelle find,
only grass that grows to my advance stop!

    OK, I don't think I could make them much longer without making it feel like a prose poem. Actually, I would have preferred to keep them shorter because there are much more possibilites of interesting line breaks if the verses were different. As you can see, it was not an easy task for me.
    However, given that the line breaks were given by syntax, verses still sound coherent, when I would have expected something much weirder. It's all the poem's fault, I guess😅

Playing with someone else's poems:

    Now, for this part of the exercise, I'll pick Miguel de Unamuno's Te recitaba Bécquer. I know, I know, it's in Spanish, but that is exactly why I decided to play around with this one -- the verses of this poem have a strict measure and rhyme scheme, so messing it up will give the poem a whole new form and sound. Besides, if I do it in Spanish, it'll feel much more personal to me as it is my mother tongue. If you don't speak Spanish, you can still see how different the poem will look like with longer verses.

    This is the original:

Te recitaba Bécquer... Golondrinas
refrescaban tus sienes al volar;
las mismas que, piadosas, hoy, Teresa,
sobre tu tierra vuelan sin cesar.
Las mismas que al Señor, de la corona
espinas le quitaron al azar;
las mismas que me arrancan las espinas
del corazón, que se me va a parar.
Golondrinas que vienen de tu campo
trayéndome recuerdos al pasar
y cuya sombra acarició la yerba
bajo que has ido al fin a descansar.

... And this is the result of the exercise:

Te recitaba Bécquer... golondrinas refrescaban tus sienes al volar; las mismas
que, piadosas, hoy, Teresa, sobre tu tierra vuelan sin cesar. Las mismas
que al Señor, de la corona espinas le quitaron al azar; las mismas
que me arrancan las espinas del corazón, que se me va a parar.
Golondrinas que vienen de tu campo trayéndome recuerdos al pasar
y cuya sombra acarició la yerba bajo que has ido al fin a descansar.

    Wow. That is something. If you pay close attention, I decided to break the lines, not by syntax, but by rhyme: the first three (new) verses end with the very same two words which Unamuno used to start each verse in a couplet for almost the whole first half of the poem, while the last three (new) verses end with a verb that uses the suffix -ar. 

CONCLUSION

    That was it for today! It's only day 2 and we have 3 left, but I already can tell these exercises are really helping me to play with words and lose any fear of words. After all, words are meant to be used, and even more in art: they are meant to be played with. 

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